For Ange and anyone else appalled by that last post, here’s an extended excerpt from Isaac Rosenfeld’s 1956 talk “On the Role of the Writer and the Little Magazine,” which Scott McLemee had a nice piece on recently, and which, if you’re acad­e­mied (or lucky) you can read the rest of in the new Chicago Review archive on JSTOR:

I am used to think­ing of the writer, then, as a man who stands at a cer­tain extreme, at a cer­tain remove from soci­ety. He stands over against the com­mer­cial cul­ture, the busi­ness enter­prise, that whole fan­tas­tic make-​believe world which some people would like us to believe is the real world. Of course it can’t be that for the writer.

…

Now I was going to talk about the role of the writer, and it seems to me that the role of the writer unques­tion­ably is to resist the major amal­ga­ma­tion between extremes that takes place today. To resist it, or to be con­scious of it if he must come to terms with it, because even poverty costs $3500 a year. If he’s got to accept it in some respect, at most let him have no more than an ironic affil­i­a­tion. Let it not go beyond that. But then I don’t think this really defines the role of the writer to say that he must resist lest he be swal­lowed. It is not just a matter of resist­ing temp­ta­tion and I am sure that an honest man can be vir­tu­ous on $3500 a week as well as $3500 a year. At least I have always been will­ing to give it a try. But what is really bad is that when he enters the symbol manip­u­la­tion indus­tries, at that moment he enters a life that is pre­sum­ably real but really is not. It has noth­ing to do with the real­i­ties which he, as a writer, deals with and which he must live in all the time. I should say to the extent that there is a role for the writer today, the writer is better off with­out it. I mean by this the sort of role that soci­ety rec­og­nizes, the sort of role that soci­ety con­fers upon the writer. You have talent, you can push a type­writer or a pencil, you are an idea man, a livewire; we have room for you, we can use you. That sort of role he is much better off with­out. The sort of role the writer does have, that he has nat­u­rally and inevitably, is a kind of anti-​role. It is not a social role though there is need for that sort of thing in society.

…

The role of the writer gen­er­ally is the role of the artist in any soci­ety, espe­cially our own, which wel­comes the writer who is will­ing to play the unreal role; the role of the writer is always to be aware of this and to stay away from it.